BYU officials chose not to attend a Provo city meeting on Saturday about the future redevelopment of the downtown area, including numerous changes that will affect university students.
The meeting on Saturday was a continuation of ongoing discussions of the Provo Downtown Strategic Plan, a look at cultural identity, civic beauty, community connections and urban variety in an attempt to improve the city for all those living here.
Members of the group noted the significant representation of students mixed in with the permanent residents of the Provo population, and spent time discussing how to maximize the downtown district for all members of the community.
BYU comprises a large part of Provo city. With the number of BYU students reaching close to 33,000, the university alone makes up about 29 percent of Provo's population.
The university was not made aware of the first two meetings because of confusion about who should be contacted.
"It's just hard to know who from the university should come [to the meetings]," said Paul Glauser, Provo Redevelopment Agency director. "We've got a few students and faculty members who come of their own volition because they're interested. The university is such a large organization it's hard to say who we should talk to about each individual issue."
The university was made aware of Saturday's meeting, yet did not send a representative.
"There are a lot of different obligations that our university officials have going on," said Michael Smart, media relations manager for University Communications. "There just wasn't room on the calendar."
Carri Jenkins, assistant to the president for University Communications, said that if they were invited to a meeting, they would certainly review the request. Then, once a decision has been made, BYU would send the most appropriate person for that particular meeting or assignment.
In Saturday's downtown meeting, where BYU was not represented, almost all of the discussion of urban variety centered around increasing student activity in the downtown area, student housing issues and transportation.
While the university and the city work well together on some issues, there may be room for improvement when it comes to communication.
"There is good cooperation [between BYU and the city] on a lot of issues," Glauser said. "I think maybe that we each get going down our own paths. We each have our own missions and sometimes they intersect and sometimes they don't."
Glauser also mentioned the different goals and objectives of the city and the university that need to be considered when looking at their relationship.
However, the overwhelming attitude of those in attendance at the meeting seemed to be that either BYU or Provo was more interested in its own agenda than working together for everyone's benefit.
When it comes to events and student activity downtown, Annalisa Jensen, the owner of Gallery OneTen, said she thinks the university might see themselves as in a contest for student attendance at social activities.
"I think they see it like, 'we can't advertise your events because it's in competition with our events,' but I don't think it needs to be that way," Jensen said. "If students are able to know what's going on and participate there will be an upswelling of community activity, and it will create more of a synergistic relationship between the university and the city."
However, Jenkins doesn't see the university as in competition with the city events.
"I don't think that at all," she said. "We have so many students here on campus who are very involved in what's happening in our community."
If people are concerned about not being able to pass out flyers or advertise on campus, Jenkins said they should note that even the university students aren't allowed to do so without going through an approval process. But she offered other means of advertising around the university.
"The Daily Universe is certainly a wonderful mechanism that's in place to distribute news about community events," Jenkins said.
But the tension doesn't just come from the university. Katherine Glover, a retail marketing and recruiting specialist brought in as a consultant on the Provo Strategic Plan project, brought up both the openness and the resistance Provo has for the students.
"People want the students, but then they don't," Glover said. "Students bring noise, and people don't like the housing."
Brandon Plewe, assistant professor of geography at BYU, who was not representing BYU, called the relationship between the city and the university schizophrenic.
"The city doesn't know whether it loves it [BYU] or hates it," Plewe said. "They're not foes because they need each other, and yet they have competing issues with what they want."
Along the lines of communication, Glauser said it was troublesome that BYU doesn't inform the city when it is going to make big changes that will not only affect the students but the city as a whole.
"BYU radically changes their whole policy on bus passes, and we read about it in the newspaper the next morning," Glauser said. "It happens a lot with housing. They change the radius where they'll approve housing, and we read about it in the papers, and that changes the whole housing demographic of the area."
Jenkins said, however, the university does try to send communication in an adequate amount of time.
"With the change that we had with the two-mile radius, we announced that five years before it was put in place, and there was a lot of media attention at the time," Jenkins said. "It was certainly not something that happened overnight."
Along with noting a lack of communication, Glauser also cited an example of how communication and working together with BYU had really enhanced the city's discussion of a downtown convention center project.
"When we were working on a downtown convention center, there was someone from conferences and workshops from BYU chosen to serve on that task force, and that man really added a lot," Glauser said.
The benefits of a future relationship between the city and the university at the Downtown Strategic Plan meetings are unknown.
"We would first need to be invited. It's not something that we're going to interfere with the city on, and then we would carefully review it," Jenkins said.
In general, there are fundamental differences between the university and the Provo city government.
"Universities don't want to become cities, and a city should never function as a university," Glauser said. "It might just be like having two 600-pound gorillas in the same room."
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